www.masthead.com.au

Maybe the most enduring lesson - discovered, repeated and learned - in almost four decades in the visual communications, design, advertising and marketing / marcomms fields is that, while technology and the 'tools of the trade' have revolutionised the workspace in great leaps and bounds, fundamentally unchanged is human nature, our essential needs, and the perceptors and receptors of our communication with one another and the world at large.

Copywriting a meaningful TL;DR summary is a 'techno-English' artform just as important as the grammar, punctuation and presentation of its original. Perhaps contrary to 21st Century first impressions, your audience WILL read and digest intelligently-crafted messages with content of interest to them, irrespective of a particular channel's constraints and possibilities.

Examples: back in 2014-2017, MD&C was managing the integrated website CMS and social media comms for a not-for-profit client with an average post reach engagement of 3,000 - a number which astounded other clients in 2021; in 2017-2019, after rebuilding and repopulating another client's website CMS, the number of unique visitors shot up in double-digit percentages in the first six months alone.

Results due, in no small way, to the solid grounding in English delivered by some amazing teachers at Churchie in the late 1970s, and reinforced by the eye-popping advertising industry insights of the great David Ogilvy in the tertiary studies which followed.

Sound branding design is an exercise for the imagination and the long-haul: what looks spiffy as an animated social media GIF or .ico file today may not workably translate from 96dpi RGB into an embroidered polo shirt design (of an affordable number of stitches) in a coupla months' time (when your business grows to catch the eye of sponsors for an event).

And what's the point of these fragmentary reflections? Well, setting theology and existentialism to one side - and with a nod of the head to Hymn 459 ('Ancient and Mouldy Revised' - "Time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all its sons away ...") - it distills to an essential insight.

There's nothing new under the sun, except what YOU bring to it.

Pay attention to history and learn from it - chances are, you're not the first in a particular situation - and the faster you can develop a sense of context the faster you can work out where you fit in and how to maximise opportunities ... or whether you're going to break out of the box and blow expectations away.

Maybe you're still reading at the end of this professional meandering; if so, thank-you for your time and attention, and hopefully these musings may have triggered some insights. Because another learning is that embodied by our First Nations Peoples - in the end, it's all about STORY ... and human nature is always engaged by the good telling of a story, in words or pictures, or word-pictures.

Matt Tesch (1979)

• 35+ years' design & comms experience
• 15 published books (incl 5 global sellouts)
• 5 territory, state & national awards
• multiple industry sectors and broad marketing expertise